Obamanet Shows Its Fangs

This is from June but illustrates nicely the gaming which becomes standard practice once an industry becomes “highly regulated.”

(From The Wall Street Journal)

Expect more companies to demand similar favors from bureaucrats. If Obamanet had been in effect earlier, competitors would have objected to Amazon’s deal with Sprint that enabled instant delivery of e-books on the Kindle. Regulators could have rejected the iPhone for bundling Internet access with phone service. Newspapers could have lobbied regulators to block free news sites as “unfairly” priced.

A streaming-video service could now petition the FCC to declare Netflix’s proprietary content-delivery system “unfair,” an argument similar to the one Commercial Network Services is making against Time Warner. An adverse FCC ruling could be fatal to Netflix—which would serve Netflix right for lobbying in favor of regulating the Internet as a utility.